Government Failure: Nebraska’s Safe Haven Laws

In 2008, Nebraska introduced a safe haven law allowing parents to hand children up to the age of 18 over to state custody without prosecution. The law was intended to protect babies from being abandoned by panicking mothers.

However, it didn’t take long for many desperate parents to realise that this was their chance to give up caring for their brat teenagers. As the New York Times reports, the state recorded 35 cases of older children, mostly aged between 10-17 years, being dropped off at hospitals by parents who claimed that they were uncontrollable and needed psychiatric help and counselling … sounds like normal teenagers to us!!

The law was eventually revised to apply only to babies aged up to 30 days old.